


Girls Your Age

by grapefruity



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Humanstuck, Songfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2016-09-12
Packaged: 2018-07-13 20:56:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7136786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grapefruity/pseuds/grapefruity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>And he says girls your age, never mean what they say</em>
</p>
<p><em>I've got a renegade heart, and it's screaming</em> his <em>name</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 17

_17 running from innocence_

_Like it's a l i o n_

_Nipping at my heels_

_But I'm young, so I outrun 'em_

 

He’s known Terezi since they were young enough to still be dipping their fingers into paint and letting her flick the red into his auburn hair. 

 

                (she always found that the funniest— “They may call you a redhead but it isn’t red enough Mister!”)

 

In fact it’s pretty ridiculous just how long he’s known her, even if the years feel like they’ve been compressed into a bite sized version of the true extent of time that he’s gotten familiar with her habits, knows her favorite song backwards.

 

It’s routine; She barks, he bites. Every time. Or every time… _for a while._ Until every time turns into sometimes, and then turns into every once in a while. And then she’s just a pass that passes him in the school corridors, and he has the urge to maybe, set ‘Ode to Crayola’ and hope it rings when she’s across his locker retrieving her own books for the day. 

 

It’s only when the comfort of her presence is absent from his life that he pays more attention to her, curses himself for not being grateful while she was still around. Curses himself for not realizing that he had so much to be grateful for, and so much that he chased away by being too abrasive, too overbearing. 

 

In junior year, she starts hanging out with Vriska Serket. Not that this is a surprise - for a while in Middle School the two stuck together like glue, until Vriska moved cities and Terezi grew up. And then she moved back and for some reason they came together again and everyone and their mom knows that Vriska brings storm clouds and hurricanes wherever she goes. 

 

The change is gradual, so much so that Karkat feels like he’s the only one who notices. Terezi stops chewing at her candies in class, her clothes switch it up and the number of times he sees her in school decreases. It’s like one morning she woke up and she was five years older, finally ready to embrace the rebellious teenage lifestyle that she was meant to start having way back when, instead having chosen to stay in her horrendous rainbow leggings and dragon print shirts. 

 

———

 

Everyone hears about the accident. It’s pretty much, all anyone can talk about, because they’re a bunch of teenagers and somehow the subject of a girl getting her eyes infused with glass shards is something that makes for hot gossip over subpar lunch. Karkat is sick to death of the different stories that come up at this point.

 

_I hear that she was trying to blow up_  
                                                                                  _the school, or something crazy like that. She_  
_always had a few screws loose._

 

_Yeah? Well I heard that she and that Serket girl were performing  
          some sort of Black Magic ritual and then both of them winded up with missing body parts. Spooky._

 

Frankly he doesn’t give a shit about what happened. Okay, he gives like, a marginal fraction of a shit. But largely, he just gives a shit about her because the last thing she remembers of him is a pale, kind of skinny freckled asshole with eyebags and too much auburn hair to be real. He doesn’t stop to think ‘I’ve hardly had a conversation with her that’s lasted more than five minutes in the past year,’ before he heads out the door, skips school and finds his way to the hospital she’s in. He gets lost twice, and then has to call Latula to meekly get her room number before he manages his way in past the nurses because, he isn’t family and it for some reason puts a bitter taste in his mouth.  


  
She looks like total shit. That’s really the only way to put it. Her hair is a mess, her eyes are covered in bandages and her skin’s paler than normal. She’s also got a bajillion tubes on her and he feels a little bit nauseas. _Pull it the fuck together Vantas._

 

“Who’s that?” She asks in a gravelly tone, like it’s a question she’s bored of having to ask.

 

“Your neighborhood asshole,” He manages, moving over to her bed and takes the chair beside it. 

 

He sees her tense a little, before she laughs, emptily, simply blowing air out of her mouth without any real intention. “Aw, now you’re making me sad that I can’t see Karkat Vantas himself actually expressing what appears to be empathy. For me! Of all people too!” 

 

For a second, he almost smiles. Then he catches himself, and then hates himself because he remembers, _she can’t see it anymore._ “Yeah well, I heard you did something stupid to land yourself in here and I had to come and confirm it for myself. Pretty fucking amazing I have to say Pyrope, you never cease to bring about the wonders of what idiocy can achieve,”

 

She says “Aren’t you as sweet as ever?”

 

And in reply, he says “Hardly,”

 

A beat passes. And then two. “What are you doing here, Karkat? You don’t talk to me for, what months? We treat each other like strangers. And now you’re here. Why?”

 

He struggles, he does, he reaches in and he looks for the old her in the way she says it but the inescapable reality is that she’s not the same Terezi. It takes getting yourself impaled through the eyeballs by your best friend to wake you up, change you and reshape you into an aged version of yourself from a day ago, and he can’t come to terms with that.   
  
“I miss you,” He finally rasps out.

 

She turns her head in the direction of his voice. Her features are more gaunt now, he notices, like she’s literally become a shell of her old self. “So do I,” She finally mumbles back, a sad smile ghosting her lips. “But then again, I started missing who I was a while ago. It’s a bit late for you to catch on now,”

 

He doesn’t say it but in his head, he knows. He knows that she threw away the cheerful brace-faced thirteen year old that got taffy stuck in her rainbow brackets the minute she realized that she’d matured past him. And he knows that she excelled at the task of maturity faster than he probably ever could. 

 

Doesn’t make it anymore fair. 


	2. 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Head's up, #TW for mild drug references, and allusions towards domestic abuse.

_Jailbait baby hunting men in their 20's_

_Cupid's shooting arrows, but I'm cold so I outgun ‘em_

 

She grows used to her disability, and somehow adapts to life with a cane better than she had with functioning eyes. He’s not really surprised, because he’s learnt with time that Terezi Pyrope is pretty much a badass and nothing can stop her - like a goddamn firecracker that never burns out. 

 

Unfortunately it seems that everyone’s spark fizzles out at some point, it’s just unfortunate that he’s not around to try and keep hers alive.

  
Her parents had pulled her out of school then, sent her somewhere private and upstate and definitely anal about the use of technology because the most he could talk to her was a couple times every week and usually on the weekends. It was more progress than they had made in the huge gap that had filled their friendship prior to that and oddly enough it was easily done, like taking a breath of air after holding your nose for half a minute. Relieving to a point where you get used to breathing again, you get used to normalcy. And then one day you just get choked dry.

 

She told him about an array of things; Her stupid courtblock dramas, the friends she was making in her new school, what chancing upon his brother’s friends was like and how could a guy that uptight have friends who literally hid tattoos up their blouses? But she avoided talking about Vriska, in fact anytime he tried to steer the conversation down that way she shuts him down and gives him the silent treatment for a couple of hours. It’s entirely immature but it’s also effective so he learns not to ask.

 

* * *

 

Karkat starts hanging out with Gamzee Makara towards the end of high school. He’s a few years senior, and well, the two of them only start hanging out because he starts off as his dealer. In the back of his mind something nags at him that that’s possibly the shittiest type of friend you can make, but a moment of reconsideration leaves him reminding yourself that _he’s_ the shittiest type of friend you can make. 

 

They coop up in Gamzee’s beat up van, smoke pot and Karkat unwinds and rants while Gamzee gives him a dopey look and spouts bullshit about zen and chakras. It helps because it’s nice, for once, to feel so far from reality that there’s someone who doesn’t even believe in the notion of real life responsibility.

 

For the initial stages that’s how it works, Gamzee stays high, Karkat bitches, and they form an odd enough friendship that Karkat becomes more and more comfortable with the pothead and more and more reclusive when it comes to everyone else in his life. Part of him is aware of how painfully hypocritical it is that he’s doing the same thing he had wished Terezi hadn’t done, but by this point they’re long past the point of return. She’s off.. somewhere, being amazingly resilient in masking how broken she is and he’s out here, baring his damage to the world but having no one to show it off to besides a lanky giant who’s more trapped in his own world than anyone else’s.  
  
It’s only after a while, that he notices that Gamzee doesn’t have many friends. Close to none, actually - and for a guy who seems like the perfect example of the gentle giant, that raises a few questions.

 

“Gamzee,” He asks one day, rolling over on the set up of mats that Gamzee has at the back of his van. “Uh just wondering, where the fuck is everyone else in your life? I seriously doubt that a sad sack of shit known as yours truly would be the only companion, acquaintance, whatever, that you have,”

 

If he focused carefully, he’d have noticed the slight tension in his neck, the way his fingers gripped at his joint a little more stiffly. But focus and hash? Not two things that go hand in hand. So what he sees is how Gamzee smiles like he’s finding the proper words, rolling them around on his tongue.

 

“Brother, I don’t need no one but you,” He drawls, before taking another long drag, puffing out a thin line of smoke. “But I got me a girl, actually, pretty lil’ bird, sings like one too, and zips around like a damn firecracker,” He continues, slouching back into his place. It takes Karkat by surprise because, how the hell did someone like Gamzee score anyone at all? Then again, he’s not in much of a position to judge, so he takes it for what it is, giving him a reluctant nod before turning his attention back to the crack lines in the fake leather stretched over his couch.

 

* * *

 

He doesn’t intend to spy, stalk, whatever this is, but being crouched behind a shrug with his eyes focused on her hair (red, firecracker red) and her hands (skinny, frail, looking like they might snap) locked in his, he actually feels compelled to whip out a pair of binoculars and further inspect the scene because there’s no way this is real.

 

The first thing that he noticed on his walk back from the grocery store was Gamzee’s shock of tangled hair, and his thin, lanky frame - though it wasn’t slouched over the way it got when he was stoned, more rather, rigidly straightened and the dopey, glassy look in his eye was replaced with something more… menacing.

 

The second thing he notices is that the person his supposed best (only) friend is hunched over, snarling at, is the one girl he thought he’d never see again. She has a cane clutched at her side, and her milky eyes are staring off around where Gamzee’s knees are while she shakes with each syllable he punctuates, and her thin (when did she get so damn thin?) frame tries to curl in on itself.

 

She looks younger than he remembers, but not in the good way.

 

So, like any other casual creep, he follows them. Gamzee has his hand tightened around both hers, and her wrist, and she’s being yanked along like a deflated doll with half its stuffing ripped out, chewing consciously at her lower lip while her free hand rubs nervously into the juncture between her forearm and her bicep. Terezi, from what he could recall, only got nervous on a couple occasions.

 

Whenever Latula was in the same proximity as her friends, and the attention went to the former instead of to her.

The day she sent in her results and sat at her doorstep waiting for the acceptance letters she needed to validate herself.

So this? This was beyond normal; The whole situation felt beyond normal, and he had half a mind to wonder if he’d been spiked or something from how much he wanted to upchuck whatever he’d ingested over the past week. And then they’re gone, Gamzee pulling her roughly off to his apartment and her downcast figure disappearing into the darkness of it.

 

* * *

 

The next time he sees her, she’s sitting across from him, picking at a piece of french toast while her rather shaky arms fail to ever deliver it to her mouth. His heart breaks more and more and he kind of hates her for still managing to shatter him from the inside out after all this time. He decides, though, that he hates Gamzee more.

 

“Lovely weather, huh,” She mumbles. You can’t help but feel your mouth run dry.

 

“Terezi—” He begins.

 

“I’ve been meaning to check out that new park down the road from here; Heard they put in a bunch of tulips, nothing screams Spring more than tulips, right?” She continues, pace running something of a mile a minute while she further cuts up her food.

 

“ _Terezi,”_ He’s pleading now - and despite himself, he reaches across for her hand. He doesn’t miss the small way she tenses, the same way he missed Gamzee’s shift. But she doesn’t pull away either, so he takes that as some sort of opening to continue. “Just.. please, _stop,_ you know pleasantries aren’t your thing,”

 

She laughs and it’s a bitter, empty sound. “I’m open to trying out new things! It’s not life if you haven’t sampled every flavor of it!” She hums, and he can’t help but see the double meaning there.

 

“Clearly,” He replies, strained, before he gives her hand a small squeeze. Getting her things out of Gamzee’s apartment took more work than she deserved - watching her lungs squeeze up, watching her shake as she finally took the last step out, watching her cry to herself in your bathroom. But it was a step- no, one gigantic fucking leap, and only Terezi Pyrope would have been strong enough to make it. “Speaking of sampling, maybe you should give that hacked up massacre of food on your plate a shot, huh?”

 

She stays quiet a while, letting him rub small circles into her hand. Then, for a split second, something of a ghost of a smile washes over her lips. “Well,” She begins, raising her fork to her lips, trembling just a small bit. “I am _all_ about new experiences,”

 

He thinks, for a moment, that he’s completely fine with letting her be the one to break his heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wew, sorry for taking so long with this chapter guys, kind of threw it on the backburner with my exams cropping up and what not but I'm already into the chapter after this and I'll try and have it up soon! Do feel free to leave constructive crit at the bottom, and yeah stay tuned for more.
> 
> (Also on a side note, ALSO stay tuned for a potential film noir / esque fic I have in the works (-; )

**Author's Note:**

> So I heard this song on my Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist and was like "woah this would make a great Terezi fic".
> 
> Anyway, I'm going somewhere with this. (I hope.)


End file.
